Headlines

Nick Gillespie

Fracking amazing: U.S. emissions were lower in 2012 than five years ago — thanks to fracking

Hanger further notes that the U.S. is at around 1995 levels for energy-related carbon emissions. And note that lower emissions aren’t simply an artifact of the rotten economy (which however bad it is is larger than in 2007).

The shale gas boom is a product of fracking, a technology which has not only been around for decades but has apparently been found to be safe in a controversial and not-officially-released analysis prepared for New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Cuomo has been sitting on the report while deciding whether to allow expansive fracking in the Empire State.

You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not…

And Matt Damon wants to make sure it stays that way. They don’t care about “the environment”. They want to keep people down.

I’ve got a radical lefty friend (yeah, I don’t know how I stand him either) who insists that fracking is poisoning the groundwater through the chemicals (or something) that is in the water they use, and he rattles off all sorts of info when he gets on the subject (it’s kind of an obsession with him). Kind of annoying, but I haven’t been able to find unbiased data on the subject.

Fracking is not the big deal. Directional drilling is the new technology. Not much older than the Gulf spill where it was used to stop the leak. Hard to contaminate ground water from 5,000 when water is around 300 or higher with layers of impervious rock in between.